Most of Google products and services are mainly targeted towards the everyday folks Mr. Joe and Mrs. Jane Smith. The search engine, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and more have been widely adopted by the masses and made Google the largest internet company in the world.

But while the consumer market is obviously the biggest one, the enterprise market holds enormous potential as well. Giant tech companies such as IBM, Oracle and gradually increasing also Microsoft that are focusing almost exclusively on the enterprise market, have found it as a very lucrative one.

And Google wants a piece of that pie too, which will be based on the intensifying adoption of the cloud.

They even invented a {*cough* dull *cough*} name for the growing dependency of businesses on web-based tools, “Going Google”. You would have expect that some of the brightest minds in the world could come up with a bit more imaginative nickname, but they aren’t McCann Erickson that’s for sure.

Anyway, the guys from Mountain View are now releasing a few new features to Google Apps business users which {surprise, surprise!} centers around Google+ and based on the cloud. The features will be available for free until 2014 and then Google will probably begin charge for their use (if indeed they’ll get adopted broadly).

Restricted Post Sharing

A feature which allows Apps users to share posts only to the organization users on Google+. The Apps users will have an additional option on the drop down menu of who to share with on the Google+ share box which will restrict it only to the organization members. Here’s how it looks like:

Even though it may seem that this private sharing option is just a small addition, it is in fact quite huge. Businesses today are using more and more web-based private chatting tools and limited online corporate communities.

Google+ restricted posting designated to be a direct competitor to Microsoft’s recently acquired Yammer (for skimpy $1.2 billion) which offers this type of social networking services for enterprises. Google just keep heaping up reasons for Microsoft to hate it…

Connecting Hangouts With Calender

Recently, Google had already implemented its online video conference feature Hangouts into Gmail and into Docs. Now, Google also allows to add a Hangout link into Calender, to make it easier for the attendees to join the video conference.

For companies whose employees are scattered across many far places, Hangouts already proved to be working pretty great. The Hangouts’ link addition to Calender simply assists to improve the frictionless conferencing experience.

Organizational Restricting Controls

On top of those couple of features, Google also adds control options so administrators would be able to command their little (or big if you’re lucky, you SOB) empire:

• Setting the default sharing option for the organization’s users to restricted {learn how}.
• Allowing only the organization users to join Hangouts as outsiders will need an invite {learn how}.

From first impression I think that these will be great additions to businesses who are using (or looking to use) private social networking services for their company. Google are stating that more features like those will roll out on the next few months so if you are Apps users (or Microsoft) stay alert.